Eleanor Harding is a product developer and supergeek who has been called the swiss army knife of tech. She is originally from South Africa and has a background in both development and design, helping her win numerous hackathons including the prestigious TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon and the Skype Codess hack for women in tech.

Before arriving in London, she created an indie game which won the Microsoft Imagine Cup and was the design engineer in the winning, all-female team in a competition to design and race scale F1 cars.

Eleanor is now the founder of a product development consultancy called Rigby/Rose where she spends her time doing what she loves, helping startups turn their big ideas into elegant products. In her spare time she looks for ways to enable people through technology, listens to a ridiculous number of audiobooks and networks furiously.

The Chicken Soup Network

Created in just 8 hours, this Hack won 3rd Place at the Facebook Humanitarian Hackathon

With over a billion people on Facebook, we are more than ever, connected.We share our days and lives with each other, but also our germs. We all get sick.

Flu is a serious illness that still kills many and still doesn’t have a cure. It’s the virus that can’t be stopped and gets ugly when things go wrong.

With this hackathon we’re addressing the lack of in-depth, meaningful data collection about the connection between flu and human relationships.

Current data collection methods are on a large scale – region-wide trends are gathered by filtering through Google Search Data – but the web has become social. Information is connected to People, and People are connected to people.

Knowing that there is Moderate Flu Activity in Oklahoma is simply not useful.

Our MVP for this hackathon is our version of Real-Life Plague. By connecting to your Facebook account, you can track and record which of your friends you have made ill. They can then track who they’ve infected and so the graph grows.

From the User’s perspective: It’s Emotional Chicken Soup. It’s a tangible way to track accessible data in your network, in your area.

For our Partner organisations (eg. the CDC or WHO): It’s a way to intelligently track real-time flu data based on personal relationships. It’s a way to see how long strains are lasting, and how fast they are spreading.

Scalability

The idea coexists symbiotically with Facebook technology and allows for literal viral growth through personal word-of-mouth recommendations. If your sister snuffly tells you about the app, you’re going to download it.

What’s next?

This is a way to track length infection, symptoms, temperature, mood, medicine – and see how effective things are by observing the data yourself.

Effectively, we will have developed a way to pinpoint the dangerous strains of flu as they happen, where they happen, who they happen to.

Humanitarianism is about helping people when things go wrong, and so when disaster strikes, we have a way to pinpoint patient zero.